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Puck is a weekly webcomic that, in the words of one fan, is "mostly irreverent humor concerning a pretty girl with freckles and a hot she-devil who wears fan-service costumes." Surreal fantasy slice-of-life crazy-type stuff about the world's funniest redhead! Updates Tuesday.

Puck 425

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My actual conversation with my oncologist was different though no less hilarious. The exchange just didn’t totally work as a four-panel comic because it was a bit too wordy, but it went like this:
Oncologist: “So it’s tough to say what to do, but I think we should wait and see.”
Me: “Wait and see?”
Oncologist: “Yeah. See, I look at you, and I see a rule follower. I see a guy who will come back in six months for a scan and some blood work if I tell him to. Now, if you were some shabby homeless bum or something like that, someone whom I could never trust to do any follow-up, I’d take those lymph nodes out right now. But you? I trust that I can control you.”
Me: “Oh. Uhm, thanks?”

The mentioned lymph nodes, by the way, are in the torso, and they’re apparently the next place that this type of cancer will spread. If they’re taken out, the chances of it spreading further are seriously reduced. But taking them out comes with risks; apparently the surgery is right next to some key nerves, and if the nerves are damaged (which happens most of the time), it seriously messes up a dude’s … workings. Long story short, that which shoots outward a certain, um, climactic moment stops shooting outward and shoots inward. Which did not sound cool to me.

All said and told, ‘wait and see’ sounded like a very attractive approach.

Discussion (83) ¬

I did a med mal case once where the guy went in for a mere vasectomy and the butcher of a doc cut a lot of those key nerves instead, even though they were anywhere close to where he was supposed to be cutting. This was not fun. So, not a risk to ignore.

I thought the exact same thing, though I took the pose directly from a Bill Watterson pic and Hobbes had his fingers like that. Though I totally agree with you. As a sledding pro, I can say that you NEVER do that on an old toboggan.

That looks dangerous. I am not a fan of metal sleds. Honestly, I’m not a fan of wooden sleds either. The ideal sled is plastic and weighs no more than a pound. That way, if you flip out, it won’t smack you in the head and give you a concussion.

Sorry Salem, but to heck with a snow plane. When we were kids, my dad got my brother and I a couple of inner tubes from tractor-trailer tires. He managed an auto parts store, see, so for him they were cheap. They were faster than any sled, could take an enormous amount of abuse and had built in shock absorbers! Ok, there were some *ahem* control issues, but that was part of the fun! I highly recommend getting one, except they are pretty damn pricey. Don’t bother with the vinyl tubes that are sold in stores, they suck and tend to break easily.

Saucers and krazy carpets are both excellent; but no-one in this string has mentioned the GT Snowracer? I can personally attest that they are (were?) fast enough to break a wrist. If you take a wooden jump and superman off the sled.

I disliked the Noma GT Snowracer. For many reasons:
1) Depending on conditions, they really weren’t that fast. Speed on snow is determined by a reduction in friction, and in most snow conditions, the best way to do that is to get the widest surface area possible so as to reduce the pressure on any given area. The Snowracer tracks often dug into the snow, and that slowed you down.
2) The seat was raised, which raised your center of gravity. Which meant that you wiped out more. And when you wiped out, you had further to fall, leading to injury. (Hence the wrist.)
3) They actually attached freakin’ BLADES to the bottom as a brake system. Anyone who’s ever gotten a limb tangled up in one of those things can tell you that’s no fun.
4) The steering mechanism is a cool concept, but really it often led to kids fighting with gravity too hard and flipping out because of it.

They were the ‘coolest’ sled in the 80’s, but as a Canadian kid who did A LOT of sledding (or ‘tobogganing’ as we call it up here), I can say that I never liked them.

Generally, you want tor REDUCE the contact area to an absolute minimum.

The problem is, as the contact area is reduced, the demands placed on the materials increase to a point that one or the other yields, deforms, fails.

An interesting example is the extremely hard “jewels” in a traditional watch. Combined with a hardened steel axle, the contact area is minimal, as is the friction and wear.

On Ice, the thin steel edges of the sharpened Skate blade contact hard ice. Like Watch’s Steel and Jewel, both surfaces are hard, and the friction is slight.

Snow is another matter. Mainly because it varies so much !

It’s said the Inuit have a thousands words for Snow (the actual number varies), and no wonder !
The varieties of snow are endless, and rarely appreciated by those who live in warmers climes.

The very cold snow that has fallen slowly and gently accumulates into piles of cotton that burst into a cloud of tiny flakes with even a sneeze.

But the warmer, wet snow can be heavy and massive; difficult to walk thru; excruciating to shovel.

The Sled that works well on one may have no chance on another.

A special sort of snow is one that began life as soft snow, but after a sunny day warmed at the top, then froze again. This kind can often be walked upon quite easily ! But beware – if you have a heavy foot you’ll break thru the top layer and your feet will descend to the bottom. If the soft foundation is deep you can find yourself quite trapped !

I have to give you all of that. Growing up in Fort Erie we kept a stable of sleds for different conditions: Discs and Krazy Karpets were best for new soft snow. A Flexible Flyer my Mom had kept from her childhood was usually the distance winner if the snow was hard packed, or icy. We never had a classic toboggan. But when I had saved up enough lawnmowing money to get my GT I thought it was the coolest thing ever. They were no good in powder, might as well leave it at home until the hill had been packed down for a day, but if it just barely melted, then refroze so there was a slick surface, especially with a bit more soft snow on top, you could zoom down the hill and do an awesome hockey stop skid at the bottom – definitely have to lean way into it or like you wrote you’ll fly off the side. So much fun. I also feel like the Snowracer is proof of Canada’s excellence in all forms of winter technology. “You put years of development into a new form of kids sled?” “Yes, yes we did”. I’ve moved to the States and gotten it out at hills here and people just look at it wondering that such a thing exists.

There are fans of it, to be sure. I was arguing with my friend Mary the other day (oddly enough) about the Snowracer. She grew up in Sault Ste. Marie (known merely as ‘the Sault’ -pronounced ‘Soo’) and there’s one thing they know a lot about in the Sault, it’s snow. And she insisted that the Snowracer was not only the best sled ever, but was REQUIRED for the kind of perilous sledding they used to do.

Hi SalemCat,
It’s interesting you mention rockets. I only ever did a little bit of kite flying, and no model airplanes or shooting. But I did do rockets. There were a few parks we could fly them in in the late 80s and early 90s that were big enough. I’m lucky my in-laws have fields big enough so I’ve flown them with nephews there with no problem. But a couple summers ago I tried flying them with friends and we went to a school nearby with soccer and baseball fields. We lost one and almost lost another, and we couldn’t think of any bigger fields that didn’t also have power lines. Also then a security guard came and said we had to go somewhere else to do that anymore. It’s hard in the city 🙁

I can really not argue with the wait and see approach.
I mean, I could, except that I won’t.
That said, I hope both for you and Colin’s sake that neither of you will have to deal with the lymph nodes removal.
A friend had to get them removed (though I never did find out why) and was lucky enough NOT to get screwed over by it.

Getting lymph nodes removed is never fun. I mean, it doesn’t sound so bad because no one’s really too emotionally attached to their lymph nodes, unlike, say, a lung. But you need your lymph nodes. And removal of said lymph nodes can sometimes cause all sorts of problems.

Hee hee. Those are the splanchnic parasympathetic nerves. They go to that Important Male Organ very close to “The Boys.” In fact, I would say that it was “The Boy Himself,” and if THAT became, um, nonfunctional, Colin would quickly quit worrying about his Missing Boy. 😛

Alcohol, of whatever kind, is a terrible disinfectant and is never used in hospitals (or doctors’ offices) except as a placebo for patients, since its only function is the cooling of the skin reduces the pain of puncture slightly. Not that is that bad, unless you are counting chest trocars. We use Betadine, PhisoHex, or other, stronger antiseptics. Ethyl alcohol, on the other hand, makes a pleasant soporific, such as the Irish Coffee I am drinking now. 😛

In lab healthcare, we don’t ask, we just do. Patients are usually miles away from reality, worrying about something they thought the doc said. We need to get the blood that the doc ordered, so anything that would bring them back to reality, like a change in routine, is undesirable. Usually, I am out the door before the alcohol dries, though we were told in school that if you stab while the alcohol is still wet, it might vitiate the test. “Red top, check, lavender top, check, marble top, check… when’s lunch?”

Yeah, I never got that. My phone has been in the bathroom all of twice in the 3+ years I’ve owned it (maybe 5 times across all phones for the past 13-14 years) and it never leaves my pocket when that happens. Maybe I’m a little germaphobic, but it shouldn’t be that hard to set your electronics down for a couple minutes.

When you consider how far from the bathroom the “bathroom matter” travels, I’m not concerned with taking my phone in there. I mean, remember the episode of Mythbusters when they tested that? They found “bathroom matter” in the break room, even though the test they ran had everyone washing their hands after.

Actually, that is known as “retrogade emission” and is a rare complication in my (admittedly limited) experience. OTOH, I have seen the OTHER complication occur three times. One was after a pelvic exenteration, but, still…

I guess that would work. The real doctor that this portrayal is based on is Israeli, and speaks with a marked accent, but I thought it would get annoying if I tried to depict that phonetically, so I just left it out. Colm Feore works. I saw him play Lear at Stratford a few years ago. Dude’s a real actor.